International Sanctions and Constitutional Compliance

Many studies have evaluated whether sanctions improve or harm the living conditions of target populations, for example in terms of the protection of human rights. However, judging governments' responses to international sanctions based on their compliance with a universal human rights standard has been criticized as an imposition of Western values. We propose an alternative benchmark for government action that is not subject to the same criticism: whether governments comply with their own national constitutions as codified forms of the national social contract. Our analysis of 182 countries over the period 1962 to 2022 using panel DiD and event study estimators corroborates our theoretical expectation that government responses depend on the target's regime type. Whereas democracies improve their constitutional compliance under sanction pressure, autocracies start complying even less. These results suggest that sanctions can only make governments comply with their legal commitments if those governments face binding reelection constraints.